LLMs may have kicked off this AI boom, but the ceiling is closer than the hype suggests. As models run out of text data to train on, the companies and investors paying attention are already moving on. The next wave isn’t better chatbots; it’s machines that can understand the physical world. Luma AI, the Bay Area lab that raised over $1.4 billion from a16z, Nvidia, and Amazon, is betting on exactly that.

On episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan sat down with Amit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Luma AI, at Web Summit Qatar. Together, the pair dug into where the next trillion-dollar AI opportunity actually gets built, and whether the companies chasing it even know what they’re building yet.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:13 Why LLMs are hitting a ceiling

02:43 The data problem & what comes after LLMs

04:30 What actually makes a world model a world model

06:05 Why 3D data is a dead end

07:39 What Luma is building next

09:08 How much humans stay in the loop

10:00 Near-term use cases for agentic video

11:22 Will AI kill jobs in film & production?

13:30 Why the entertainment industry is already dying

15:27 Why we actually need more content, not less

17:46 Luma’s roadmap: generation, understanding, and robotics

19:54 Outro